Jessica Diamond initially attracted international attention with her murals, drawings and conceptual works that explore art market mechanisms, socio-economic abuses and gender issues. Rooted in the politically charged context and aesthetics of urban graffiti, Diamond’s early murals often featured bold statements in garish colours. One work shouted ‘YES BRUCE NAUMAN’ at us, another advised us to ‘attack life’s problems with the axe of art’. Diamond even painted her statements – stylised and enlarged – on the white walls of museums and galleries. They confronted viewers, in a very direct way, with positive critical thinking on art, sexuality and everyday life.
Her series New Economic Shorthand (1990) includes texts such as ‘No Money’ (a dollar sign placed in a zero), ‘What Money’ (the two vertical strokes of the dollar sign intersecting a question mark) and ‘Totally Inequal’ (a crossed-out equal sign). And in large black letters she unequivocally declared ‘I Hate Business’. These simple statements have a sardonic ring to them when presented in select exhibition spaces: successful galleries and heavily sponsored museums in art-world hubs such as New York and Cologne, where prices for art are inflated at will. The artist makes no bones about the charges she levels at these institutions. Via unsalable art chalked on the walls, she highlights the art world’s hyperbolic narratives and fakery.
Diamond’s expressive pamphleteering tone slowly gave way to more serene compositions in the late 1990s. With the site-specific project Mystic Leaves (1999-2001) on the Kouter in Ghent, inspired by the verdant landscapes in the Ghent Altarpiece, the artist even ventured into the tried-and-tested tradition of the public monument. The series of murals Eros (Rain): The Storms (1999) are alternately subtle, sensual and erotically charged. This particular work is inspired by a Taoist guide to weather divination, which states, among other things, that sexual intercourse will elicit rain. The artist uses cloudbursts as orgasmic metaphors. Diamond’s art can be read as a veiled rejection of ‘male’ spirituality. Yet the physical becomes spiritual in her work. Or rather, it becomes evident that the two are indivisible. Diamond turns the frigid wall into an imaginative and passionate site of physical and sensual self-manifestation. With all the forces of nature that we are taught to distrust. The striking colours and bold visual gestures in her work are highly seductive, so too the sensuous physicality and intense combination of organic and abstract, naivety and ecstasy.
